In Search of the Ideal Storage Configuration for Docker Containers
In Search of the Ideal Storage Configuration for Docker Containers Vasily Tarasov1, Lukas Rupprecht1, Dimitris Skourtis1, Amit Warke1, Dean Hildebrand1 Mohamed Mohamed1, Nagapramod Mandagere1, Wenji Li2, Raju Rangaswami3, Ming Zhao2 1IBM Research—Almaden 2Arizona State University 3Florida International University Abstract—Containers are a widely successful technology today every running container. This would cause a great burden on popularized by Docker. Containers improve system utilization by the I/O subsystem and make container start time unacceptably increasing workload density. Docker containers enable seamless high for many workloads. As a result, copy-on-write (CoW) deployment of workloads across development, test, and produc- tion environments. Docker’s unique approach to data manage- storage and storage snapshots are popularly used and images ment, which involves frequent snapshot creation and removal, are structured in layers. A layer consists of a set of files and presents a new set of exciting challenges for storage systems. At layers with the same content can be shared across images, the same time, storage management for Docker containers has reducing the amount of storage required to run containers. remained largely unexplored with a dizzying array of solution With Docker, one can choose Aufs [6], Overlay2 [7], choices and configuration options. In this paper we unravel the multi-faceted nature of Docker storage and demonstrate its Btrfs [8], or device-mapper (dm) [9] as storage drivers which impact on system and workload performance. As we uncover provide the required snapshotting and CoW capabilities for new properties of the popular Docker storage drivers, this is a images. None of these solutions, however, were designed with sobering reminder that widespread use of new technologies can Docker in mind and their effectiveness for Docker has not been often precede their careful evaluation.
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